The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

ZEN stone gale

stone notch and gale-force winds, temporally smeared with
digital echo, buddha-nature everywhere in the +/-
characteristics of maximum/minimum light, i'm damned with these
poor works gone missing. terrible works, gale-force makes
nothing. just dead work, transparent digital trickery. buddha
nature vomits.

stone / wind / notch / analog fury / digital smear

"The Chinese word for 'landscape' is _shansui,_ which means
'mountains and waters.'"

"The Tiantai School was transmitted to Japan (as Tendai
Buddhism) by the monk Saicho, who picked up the line of thinking
developed by Zhanran and was the first in Japan to write of 'the
Buddha-nature of trees and rocks' (_mokuseki bussho_)."

"Especially find specimens of these Taihu rocks -- which look
like frozen billows of ocean spume, or enormous stone fungi
burgeoning into the air, or extravagant coral formations poised
in an invisible ocean"

- from Francois Berthier, Reading Zen in the Rocks, essay by
Graham Parkes

"Therefore we may know that the single mind of a single particle
of dust comprises the mind-nature of all sentient beings and
Buddhas ... All things (_dharmas_), being immutable, are the
_Bhutatathata,_ and the _Bhutatathata,_ responding to causation,
is all things ... Therefore when we speak of all things, why
should exception be made in the case of the tiny particle of
dust? Why should the substance of the _Bhutatathata_ pertain
exclusively to 'us' rather than to 'others'? Thus there is no
water without waves; there are no waves without wetness. This
wetness does not distinguish between the muddy and the limpid,
yet the waves are of themselves either clear or turbid.
Irrespective of their clarity or turbidness, there is for them
only the one undifferentiated nature. And irrespective of what
is primarily or secondarily created (by _karma_), according to
ultimate Truth there is not the slightest distinction. If on the
one hand we grant that what responds to causation remains itself
immutable, yet on the other say that inanimate things lack (this
immutable nature), do we not fall into a self-contradiction?"

From the Chin-kang Pi (Diamond Stick) by Chan-jan (711-782), in
History of Chinese Philosophy II, p. 385, Fung Yu-Lan, trans.
Derk Bodde, Princeton University Press, 1953.

Cut the images in 15 slices, negative and positive remnants,
nothing is is left, nothing write, nothing written, I follow my
camera, spray height above cliffs (30-50' ?), this huge nameless
storm which broke trees, power grids, half a million in Maine
alone. Stopped produces entities, ongoing produces world-wide
extinctions of spray and microbe, the genocidal and annihilating
holocaust of the planet itself in terminal rebuild. I can't have
anything to say here, no punctum, everything already awash in
the flood buried within the 15 slices. Something breathes Buddha
somewhere in here, that keeps me going. Would I be a monk, would
I be a Jew, would I be nothing. Cut the images again.

http://www.alansondheim.org/akkad1229.jpg
https://youtu.be/DZfhV_5Afn8
http://www.alansondheim.org/akkad1214.jpg

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23c23
< burgeoning into the air, or extravagant coral formations poised
---
> burgeoning into the air, or extravagent coral formations poised
52,63d51
< Cut the images in 15 slices, negative and positive remnants,
< nothing is is left, nothing write, nothing written, I follow my
< camera, spray height above cliffs (30-50' ?), this huge nameless
< storm which broke trees, power grids, half a million in Maine
< alone. Stopped produces entities, ongoing produces world-wide
< extinctions of spray and microbe, the genocidal and annihilating
< holocaust of the planet itself in terminal rebuild. I can't have
< anything to say here, no punctum, everything already awash in
< the flood buried within the 15 slices. Something breathes Buddha
< somewhere in here, that keeps me going. Would I be a monk, would
< I be a Jew, would I be nothing. Cut the images again.
<

+++---+++